World War 2 heroine Nancy Wake passed away at age 98 on Sunday. Born in New Zealand and raised in Australia, Wake moved to London as a teenager, and then Paris. A trained journalist, Wake committed herself to fighting Nazis after she interviewed Adolf Hitler in Vienna in 1933.

When France fell to the Nazis, Wake become a courier for the Resistance. When she learned the Gestapo was on their way to arrest her, Wake managed to flee and ended up back in London. There she joined the Special Operations Executive, a clandestine body that trained agents in guerrilla warfare against the Nazi occupiers.

Trained in espionage and sabotage, Wake helped to arm and lead 7,000 Resistance fighters against Germany before the D-Day invasion towards the end of the war. During one raid she allegedly killed an SS guard with her bare hands. Sadly, on return home after the liberation, she discovered that her first husband, Henri Fiocca, had been tortured and killed by the Gestapo.

Wake evaded capture many times and reached the top of the Gestapo’s wanted list, according to her biographer, Peter FitzSimons. She was known to the Gestapo as The White Mouse, FitzSimons said, because “every time they had her cornered … she was gone again.”

Wake continued to work for British intelligence until 1957. She then moved back to Australia and married her second husband, John Forward. She returned to London in 2001, a few years after his death, and had lived there since. Holding France’s Legion d’Honneur, Britain’s George Medal and the US Medal of Freedom, Nancy Wake was Britain’s most decorated servicewoman from WWII. Her story inspired the 1999 novel, Charlotte Gray, which was made into a film by the same name.

Upon hearing of Wake’s death, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard had this to say: “Nancy Wake was a woman of exceptional courage and resourcefulness whose daring exploits saved the lives of hundreds of Allied personnel and helped bring the Nazi occupation of France to an end. Today our nation honors a truly remarkable individual whose selfless valor and tenacity will never be forgotten. Nancy Wake will remain an abiding inspiration to generations of Australians.”

Madame Ophelia DeVore-Mitchell, the first mixed-race model in the United States was born in 1922 in Edgefield, South Carolina to a German and French father and a Native American and African American mother. (To be honest, part of the reason why she is so inspiring to me is because she is Creole like myself.) DeVore-Mitchell attended segregated schools until she was nine years old and briefly lived with her uncle in Winston-Salem until she moved to New York City to live with a great-aunt. While in New York, she attended the Vogue School of Modeling, which excluded minorities at the time. In the first video, she describes how they thought she was white, but sporting a really nice tan.

Not one to underestimate the value of eduacation, she completed her modeling certificate, graduated from Hunter College High School, and attended New York University, majoring in mathematics. Meanwhile, she married Harold Carter, a firefighter, with whom she had five children. She later married Vernon Mitchell in 1968 who, unfortunately, died four years later.

Because of her fair complexion, she was often able to pass as Norweighan and frequently modeled internationally because it was easier for women of various cultures to break into the business. When asked about choosing to model internationally, she states bluntly that “You get recognition quickly and in a lot of foreign countries they [people] are all different colors. In that time, the image of America was totally Anglo, blonde and blue eyes.”

At the age of 24 (24!), she created her own modeling agency, the Grace Del Marco Agency, with the sole purpose of introducing more diversity to the modeling world. Her mentees included women such as Cicely Tyson, Diahann Carroll, and Susan Taylor — the long-time editor of Essence — as well as men such as Richard Roundtree and Raymond St. Jacques. Besides being a mentor for aspiring models, she was close friends with many prominent civil rights leaders including Martin Luther Jr. and Adam Clayton Powell.

Since she retired from modeling, she has focused on her agency along with establishing the first ethnic beauty contests in the United States, writing a fashion column for the Pittsburgh Courier (one of the country’s longest-running black newspapers), and creating a line for cosmetics for people of color.

Her agency was renamed Ophelia DeVore Associates and subsequently the Ophelia DeVore Organization and it still a pivotal force in the lives of people of all cultures today. At the end of the first video, she says, “Modeling was a vehicle I used to communicate a positive message of my people. I want everybody to be accepted, as human beings.”

Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst was the lesser-known (and in someways much more radical) daughter of British suffragist Emmaline Pankhurst and younger sister to the colorful Dame Cristabel Pankhurst. Like her mother and sister, Sylvia campaigned for women’s rights. Unlike them, she understood women’s equality to be part of a much larger struggle for social justice that included hands-on anti-poverty work, socialist politics, and speaking out for anti-fascist and anti-colonialist struggles around the globe.

Born in Manchester, England, in 1882, Sylvia grew up in a household brimming with social and cultural reform and experimentation. Her parents moved in circles that included artists such as William Morris and politicians, including Keir Hardie, founder of the modern English Labour Party, who became a mentor and inspired Sylvia’s socialist politics.

In 1911 she wrote a history of the militant women’s suffrage movement in England 1905-1910, The Suffragette, in which she recalled growing up in an atmosphere of political agitation. “In 1889 my parents helped to form the Women’s Franchise League. My sister Christabel and I, then nine and seven years old, already took a lively interest in all proceedings, and tried as hard as we could to make ourselves useful, writing out notices in big, uncertain letters and distributing leaflets to the guests at a three days’ Conference held in our own home.”

As a student, Sylvia aspired to a career as an artist, and trained in painting and graphic design at both the Manchester School of Art and later the Royal College of Art (London). Her pursuit of art, however, was soon eclipsed by her involvement in political activities — first the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), the suffrage organization her family had founded, and then broader social concerns.

By 1913 she had moved away from WSPU leadership to focus her energies on anti-poverty work and labor organizing. She located her efforts in London’s East End, opening a cut-price restaurant, organizing milk distribution for mothers with young children, setting up a medical clinic and a drop-in social center for the area’s impoverished residents. During the Great War she wrote passionately about the devastation visited on the East End by the air-raids — an experience that strengthened her anti-war resolve.

Sylvia broke with her mother and sister during the 1910s and 1920s over a number of political and personal decisions. When war broke out in 1914, Christabel and her mother ceased their suffrage activism in order to support the English national cause; Sylvia refused to stop her political activities or to support the war effort. She was joined in her pacisifm by younger sister Adela (b. 1885), who likewise drifted away from the WSPU during the teens. Sylvia also disagreed with her sister Christabel’s decision to focus on expanding the vote primarily to adult women of the “right” classes; for Sylvia universal suffrage was the goal. On a personal level, Sylvia’s parents disapproved of Sylvia’s relationship with Italian activist Silvio Corio with whom she lived for over thirty years and had a son, Richard, in 1927. The two shared a home in Woodford Green. After Richard was born, and Sylvia still refused to marry Silvio, Emmaline Pankhurst reportedly never spoke to her daughter again.

Beginning in the 1930s and lasting for the rest of her life, Sylvia was involved in anti-colonialism efforts in Ethiopia, eventually moving to Addis Ababa, where she was eventually joined by her son Richard (who continues to make his home there today).

I think Sylvia Pankhurst’s story is fascinating on several levels. One, I think the Pankhurst family is a case study in how feminism (and more broadly social justice activism) can speak to members of a politically-active family in very different ways. All three of the Pankhurst daughters grew up under the influence of their progressively-minded (for their time) parents, and all three went very different ways as independent adults. Two, I think Sylvia Pankhurst’s story is an early example of how feminist activism, however narrow a platform it is to begin with, can inspire people to political and social empathy beyond their own experience. Sylvia’s work in labor activism, peace activism, and anti-colonialism a seem to have grown out of (or grown alongside) her work for gender equality. Third, I think it’s interesting to note the way that Sylvia’s life and work — despite its radicalism — is so often overshadowed by her elder sister’s larger-than-life persona. It is not always the most visible personalities that are the most “out there” in terms of personal life choices and political belief and practice.

Note: I’m off this morning for a three-day weekend at my in-laws cabin in central Maine, where we have no internet access. So everyone feel free to comment on the post but don’t take it personally if I don’t respond in-thread!

Day was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1897 and as a child moved with her family to San Francisco (where she survived the 1906 earthquake) and then Chicago, where her father became a newspaper editor. Day followed in her father’s footsteps, dropping out of college in 1914, after two years at the University of Illinois, to move back to New York and work as a reporter for The Call, a socialist daily paper, and later The Masses, another radical publication.

During her years as a journalist, Dorothy Day covered peace rallies, labor strikes, and other radical causes. She was also at times a participant in such protest actions: in 1917 she was jailed, along with many other suffragists, for protesting outside of the White House, and joined her fellow activists on hunger strike while behind bars.

After the end of World War One, Day turned her attention to fiction as well as journalism, and with the income she earned as a writer was able to purchase a beach house on Staten Island, where she lived with her lover Forest Batterham, a botonist. In her autobiography, The Long Lonliness, Day describes the end of their relationship in primarily religious terms: she was an increasingly-committed Catholic and he was a staunch non-believer who was unable to accept or appreciate her religious faith. According to Day, the final straw came when she became unexpectedly pregnant and decided to go through with the pregnancy against Batterham’s wishes. Her daughter Tamar was born in 1927, and shortly thereafter both Dorothy Day and her infant daughter were recieved into the Catholic church.

Dorothy Day’s autobiography, The Long Loneliness, was first published in the 1950s and is very much a spiritual memoir. The 1996 biopic Entertaining Angels, starring Moira Kelly, cleaves fairly close to the story Day told. In the film, Martin Sheen plays Peter Maurin, the irascible refugee philosopher who became Day’s mentor and friend as she moved away from the journalism of her young adult years and into the more direct action of feeding and clothing and housing the needy during the worst years of the Great Depression.

Dorothy Day at a peace demonstration

Throughout the Second World War, Day and her fellow Workers maintained a commitement to pacifism, and following the war Day was arrested numerous times while on nonviolent protest against the Cold War and nuclear proliferation. They also became involved in the Civil Rights movement. There is a movement within the Catholic church to have Dorothy Day canonized as a saint, although throughout her life she resisted efforts to describe her work as somehow super-human, miraculous or otherwise noteworthy.

I, personally, find Dorothy Day an intensely interesting and intensely frustrating historical figure. Although she participated in suffrage activism during the 1910s, she moved away from feminist challenges to the status quo during the 1920s and 30s, and was critical of women who resisted the caretaking work that became central to her life’s project. Although a sharp thinker and gifted writer, she often deflected attention away from herself, crediting Maurin (the male philosopher) for the vision behind the Catholic Worker communities. Self-abnegation, central to the Catholic Workers’ commitment to voluntary poverty, becomes complicated when blended with narratives of gender that emphasis certain aspects of maleness and femaleness as “natural” or “essential.”

Throughout the decades of her involvement in social justice activism Day remained a chronicler, publishing articles that described the Catholic Worker movement and defending its means and aims to the public at large. Many of her writings have been made available at the Catholic Worker Movement website.

Can you imagine the world now if we'd had Pres. Chisholm in the '70s, instead of NIXON?

Born in my very own borough, educated in Barbados (her mother’s home country) and Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, Shirley Chisholm became politically aware and a social activist while still a college student, but didn’t enter politics officially until the 1960s, after a more than 15-year career as an educator.

Her first elected position was a New York State Assemblywoman in 1964, which she held for four years, before running for and winning a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1968, making her the first black woman to hold such a position. She served in the Congress from 1969 until 1982, and was a co-founder of the Congressional Black Caucus.

During her work both as a assembly member and a congresswoman, Chisholm devoted herself to progressive causes: the rights of women to bodily autonomy and equal protection under the law, the rights of working people to have job insurance, decent wages, and security, the rights of all citizens to be adequately fed and housed and educated. She also went out of her way to hire only women to work in her offices in New York and Washington.

In 1972, Chisholm undertook a run for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination on a progressive platform, speaking out for civil rights and against the institutional racism and sexism of the U.S. court system. One of six contenders (the others all white men), she lost the party’s nomination, but continued to work faithfully in the House of Representatives for another ten years.

Her “retired” life brought her back to education, and she lectured and mentored students at a number of colleges and universities, including some HBCUs, until her health forbade it. Chisholm died in Florida in 2005.

For all of these things, and for so many others I can’t even begin to describe, I nominate Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm to the Harpy Hall of Fame.

You can read more about the amazing, inspiring, brings-me-to-tears-with-her-awesomeness Shirley Chisholm in her brilliantly-titled autobiography Unbought and Unbossed, and watch a teaser for a 1972 documentary of the same name on her Presidential bid here.

Bruriah, who lived in Palestine in the 2nd century CE, is the only female sage quoted by name in the Talmud, one whose personal story has been the subject of apocryphal scandals, revisionist history and feminist reclamation.

2nd century Palestine was a hotbed of political and religious unrest; the Romans brutally oppressed anyone who might resist their rule, including scholars. Bruriah’s father, Hananiah ben Teradion, was one of the famous Ten Martyrs of that era. The Talmud describes Bruriah watching her father die for violating the Roman ban on teaching the Torah in public places. Rav Hananiah was wrapped in the Torah scroll. It was said that he faced death so heroically that his executioner jumped into the flames with him.

Before her father’s death, Bruriah joined him in the study of halakhah (Jewish law) and mishnah (the “oral Torah” that codified Jewish life). Her reputation as a scholar was well-known during her lifetime. In the Talmud (the famously dense and lengthy commentary on Jewish laws and customs), Bruriah comes across as sharp-tongued and unafraid to debate the men she studied with. She reportedly challenged her father in a discussion of ritual purity, and her insight and accuracy was praised by his colleague, Rabbi Judah Ben Bava (another of the Ten Martyrs). It was clear that she considered herself their equal, and that her fellow scholars respected her views. But Bruriah was not above mocking the misogyny of the laws she studied: the Talmud records an episode where she needled a fellow rabbi when he asked her: “Which way to Lod?” She shot back that could have asked directions in two words, “Where’s Lod?” instead of four, and that by using four words, he was breaking the Talmudic injunction not to speak to women unnecessarily.

By the medieval era, Bruriah’s image underwent an anti-feminist transformation. She was maligned by the medieval commentator Rashi, who created a scandalous story featuring Bruriah that survives to this day. In it, he says that Bruriah had scoffed at the Rabbinic dictum that “women are tempermental.” This dictum could also be translated as “women are easily seduced.” Rashi claimed that Rabbi Meir baal Hannes, her husband was deeply troubled to hear of his wife’s misbehavior, and told her, “By your life, you will end up proving the rabbis words to be true.” Rabbi Meir then set her up to be seduced by one of his students. It is said that Bruriah finally “acquiesced” to the seducer, when she learned that she’d been deceived by her husband, she was so ashamed that she hanged herself. Rabbi Meir was reportedly so stricken by remorse that he left Palestine to exile himself in Babylonia.

The story of Bruriah’s disgrace is almost certainly false and has long been debated among scholars. Rabbi Meir had supported a disastrously failed revolt against Roman rule–the Bar Kokhba rebellion—and it’s most likely that he and Bruriah fled Palestine to escape arrest by the Romans after her father was executed. That explanation was favored by other medieval (male) scholars who were suspicious of Rashi’s story. Bruriah’s reputation has been more or less reclaimed; it’s traditional among Orthodox rabbis and scholars today to name their daughters Bruriah in her honor. There is even a Modern Orthodox girls’ school in New Jersey named after Bruriah.

Modern Jewish (female) scholar Rabbi Tirzah Firestone notes that although the “seduction of Bruriah” story has survived it is most likely a medieval legend concocted to support the traditional image of women as weak and sexually corrupt, and to punish a woman who dared to join the upper echelons of male scholarship and discourage others who would follow her.

]]>http://www.harpyness.com/2010/10/06/harpy-hall-of-fame-bruriah/feed/4The Best Thing I’ve Read All Weekhttp://www.harpyness.com/2010/09/20/the-best-thing-ive-read-all-week/
http://www.harpyness.com/2010/09/20/the-best-thing-ive-read-all-week/#commentsMon, 20 Sep 2010 16:00:58 +0000http://www.harpyness.com/?p=17060Granted, it’s Monday morning, but still. I was doing some class prep this morning after an early meeting, and I ran across a piece called “An Anti-Suffrage Monologue,” by a woman I’ve never heard of before: Marie Jenney Howe, who was among other things a member of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and who wrote and performed the piece to spoof the wackadoodle arguments of anti-suffrage proponents.

Suffrage documents are pretty nifty, regardless, but I found this one extra-cool, because its funny in a way that feels contemporary, and so clearly drives home that the arguments against women’s rights have always been

1) the same damn thing, over and over, and

2) stupid. See also 1.

Here’s my favorite part (it’s a bit long, but totally worth it):

I know you begin to see how strongly I feel on this subject, but I have some reasons as well. These reasons are based on logic. Of course I am not logical. I am a creature of impulse, instinct, and intuition—and I glory in it. But I know that these reasons are based on logic because I have culled them from the men whom it is my privilege to know.

My first argument against suffrage is that the women would not use it if they had it. You couldn’t drive them to the polls. My second argument is, if the women were enfranchised they would neglect their homes, desert their families, and spend all their time at the polls. You may tell me that the polls are only open once a year. But I know women. They are creatures of habit. If you let them go to the polls once a year, they will hang round the polls all the rest of the time.

I have arranged these arguments in couplets. They go together in such a way that if you don’t like one you can take the other. This is my second anti-suffrage couplet. If the women were enfranchised they would vote exactly as their husbands do and only double the existing vote. Do you like that argument? If not, take this one. If the women were enfranchised they would vote against their own husbands, thus creating dissension, family quarrels, and divorce.

My third anti-suffrage couplet is—women are angels. Many men call me an angel and I have a strong instinct which tells me it is true; that is why I am anti, because “I want to be an angel and with the angels stand.” And if you don’t like that argument take this one. Women are depraved. They would introduce into politics a vicious element which would ruin our national life.

Fourth anti-suffrage couplet: women cannot understand politics. Therefore there would be no use in giving women political power, because they would not know what to do with it. On the other hand, if the women were enfranchised, they would mount rapidly into power, take all the offices from all the men, and soon we would have women governors of all our states and dozens of women acting as President of the United States.

Fifth anti-suffrage couplet: women cannot band together. They are incapable of organization. No two women can even be friends. Women are cats. On the other hand, if women were enfranchised, we would have all the women banded together on one side and all the men banded together on the other side, and there would follow a sex war which might end in bloody revolution.

Just one more of my little couplets: the ballot is greatly over-estimated. It has never done anything for anybody. Lots of men tell me this. And the corresponding argument is—the ballot is what makes man man. It is what gives him all his dignity and all of his superiority to women. Therefore if we allow women to share this privilege, how could a woman look up to her own husband? Why, there would be nothing to look up to.

I have talked to many woman suffragists and I find them very unreasonable. I say to them: “Here I am, convince me.” I ask for proof. Then they proceed to tell me of Australia and Colorado and other places where women have passed excellent laws to improve the condition of working women and children. But I say, “What of it?” These are facts. I don’t care about facts. I ask for proof.

Amazing. Amazing! You lucky devils, you can read the whole thing here.

Born in Richmond, Virginia, in March 1912, Dr. Height was raised in Rankin, Pennsylvania. Height was admitted to Barnard College in 1929, but was denied entrance because the school had already reached its limit of two black students. She said the experience left her crushed.

“I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep for days,” Height said.

Determined to get the education she deserved, she visited New York University with her acceptance letter from Barnard and was admitted on the spot. She earned her bachelor and master’s degrees from NYU and her doctorate from Columbia. In 2004, Barnard College formally apologized, and asked her to become an honorary alumna. She accepted.

Dr. Height was among the coalition of African American leaders who pushed civil rights to the center of the American political stage after World War II, and she was a key figure in the struggles for school desegregation, voting rights, employment opportunities and public accommodations in the 1950s and 1960s. Dr. Height was president of the National Council of Negro Women for 40 years. The 4 million-member advocacy group consists of 34 national and 250 community-based organizations. It was founded in 1935 by educator Mary McLeod Bethune, who was one of Dr. Height’s mentors.

In August 1963, Dr. Height was on the platform with Martin Luther King, Jr. when he delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial. But she would say later that she was disappointed that no one advocating women’s rights spoke that day at the March on Washington. Later in life, she became an advocate for gay rights as well, and said: ”Civil rights are civil rights. There are no persons who are not entitled to their civil rights. … We have to recognize that we have a long way to go, but we have to go that way together.”

While she was not a household name, like Dr. King, Dr. Height wielded enormous influence with the powerful. In the 1940s, she lobbied first lady Eleanor Roosevelt on behalf of civil rights causes. In the 1950s, she prodded Dwight Eisenhower to move more aggressively on school desegregation issues. In 1994, Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. In 2004, George W. Bush awarded her the Congressional Gold Medal. When America inaugurated its first black President in 2009, Dr. Height sat on the dais as he took the oath of office.

In a statement issued by the White House, President Obama called Height “the godmother of the Civil Rights Movement and a hero to so many Americans.”

“Dr. Height devoted her life to those struggling for equality . . . witnessing every march and milestone along the way,” Obama said. “And even in the final weeks of her life — a time when anyone else would have enjoyed their well-earned rest — Dr. Height continued her fight to make our nation a more open and inclusive place for people of every race, gender, background and faith.”

The late activist C. DeLores Tucker once called Height an icon to all African-American women.

“I call Rosa Parks the mother of the civil rights movement,” Tucker said in 1997. “Dorothy Height is the queen.”

As befits a queen, Dr. Height was never without a colorful crown. Melissa from Shakesville noted that she “was a woman who believed in gorgeous hats.” Here are a few. I’m sure she’s wearing one in heaven.

]]>http://www.harpyness.com/2010/04/20/harpy-hall-of-fame-dorothy-height-1912-2010/feed/4Harpy Hall of Fame: Dr. Clelia Duel Mosherhttp://www.harpyness.com/2010/04/07/harpy-hall-of-fame-dr-clelia-duel-mosher/
http://www.harpyness.com/2010/04/07/harpy-hall-of-fame-dr-clelia-duel-mosher/#commentsWed, 07 Apr 2010 15:00:29 +0000http://www.harpyness.com/?p=14630Reader joytulip sent me a neat STANFORD Magazine profile of Dr. Clelia DuelMosher, a fascinating woman who taught in Stanford’s hygiene department at the turn of the 20th century. From 1892 to 1920, she conducted sex surveys of women, including the earliest known survey of its type. The surveys were entirely forgotten until historian Carl Degler unearthed some of the questionnaires whilst combing the Stanford University archives in 1973.

Degler alerted the world to the survey’s existence in 1974 by analyzing it in the American Historical Review, concluding that although in the Victorian era “there was an effort to deny women’s sexual feelings . . . the Mosher Survey should make us doubt that the ideology was actually put into practice.” The survey was a sensation. Degler recalls feminist historians coming to the archives to make copies, and in 1980 it was printed as a book that soon hit college classrooms.

Mosher’s survey, says Stanford historian Estelle Freedman, co-author of Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, was “a goldmine” for scholars. In an era when “the public ideal was that women should be very discreet, if not ignorant, about sexuality,” says Freedman, Mosher was “asking very modern questions. She’s opening up an inquiry about what is the meaning of sexuality for women.” Mosher’s survey, like her life, gave poignant testimony to the complex desires of women who were caught between traditional feminine norms and 20th-century freedoms.

There is more to Mosher than the sex surveys. She was a harpy in every way! Her scholarly objective was to prove that women are not inferior to men. Frailties chalked up to innate sex differences were really the effects of binding garments, insufficient exercise and mental conditioning, she argued. Her master’s thesis showed that women breathe from the diaphragm just like men do, rather than from the chest, as was believed at the time. She concluded that tight corsetry accounted for this alleged biological difference.

Mosher was a loner who didn’t fit in with her male colleagues or with other women. Read the whole piece here.

]]>http://www.harpyness.com/2010/04/07/harpy-hall-of-fame-dr-clelia-duel-mosher/feed/4Harpy Hall of Fame: Corrie ten Boom (1892-1983)http://www.harpyness.com/2010/04/01/harpy-hall-of-fame-corrie-ten-boom/
http://www.harpyness.com/2010/04/01/harpy-hall-of-fame-corrie-ten-boom/#commentsThu, 01 Apr 2010 13:00:57 +0000http://www.harpyness.com/?p=14514Corrie ten Boom was born on April 15, 1892, near Haarlem, in the Netherlands. The youngest of four children, she was raised by devoutly Christian parents, members of the Protestant Dutch Reformed Church. Her father, Caspar, was a well-loved member of their community, and owned a clock and watch shop in Haarlem’s main shopping district. Caspar trained his daughter in his trade and in 1922, after a two-year apprenticeship, Corrie became Holland’s first licensed female watchmaker.

A born organizer, Corrie ran the Haarlem Girls Clubs—a kind of Christian social organization—and from 1923-1940, the clubs expanded to include thousands of girls in the Netherlands and Indonesia. The ten Booms had always embraced a peaceful, brotherly form of Christianity which rejected all forms of racism and hate-mongering. In fact, Corrie’s brother, Willem, a minister, had written his pre-ordaination dissertation on rejecting anti-Semitism. When the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in 1940, Corrie turned her considerable organizing skills to the Resistance movement, especially hiding and providing safe transport for Dutch Jews—first their neighbors, then strangers. The ten Boom’s home above the clock shop on Barteljorisstraat became known as “de schuilplaats”, or “the hiding place.”

The refugees often hid in a room that the ten Boom family had built in Corrie’s bedroom. Specially designed by an architect belonging to the Dutch Resistance, the hiding place was the size of a medium wardrobe, 30 inches deep, with an air vent on the outside wall. A small hatch slid open to let people in and out, and the entire wall felt solid, and would not sound hollow if knocked upon.

The entire ten Boom family was active in the Resistance, sheltering not only Jews, but Resistance spies and citizens hiding from the Gestapo and its Dutch collaborators. Because they were well-liked in Haarlem, especially in the church community, the ten Booms were able to call in many favors. For example, the civil servant who ran the local ration-card office was a member of their church, and Corrie had for years run a special service attended by his developmentally disabled daughter. When Corrie visited his house one evening to ask for extra ration cards, he was willing to help. When he asked how many she needed: ”I opened my mouth to say, ‘Five,’” Ten Boom wrote in her memoir, The Hiding Place. “But the number that unexpectedly and astonishingly came out instead was. ‘One hundred.’”

For years the ten Booms were extremely active in the Resistance, rescuing many people from certain death and helping to run information to other members. One of those Resistance members, a Dutch engineer named Jan, would later become a close friend of my grandfather, and hosted my parents on their first trip to Holland in 1974. A native of Amsterdam and not Haarlem, Jan did not know until after the war that the Resistance organizer who he was working for was, in fact, Corrie ten Boom.

The Germans arrested the entire Ten Boom family on February 28, 1944, acting on a tip from a Dutch informant. They were sent first to Scheveningen prison, where Caspar ten Boom died ten days later. Corrie’s sister Nollie, brother Willem, and nephew Peter were all released, although Willem later died from the tuberculosis he’d contracted in prison. But Corrie and her sister Betsie were sent to the Vught political concentration camp in the Netherlands, and finally to the notorious Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany, where Betsie died. Corrie was released on New Year’s Eve of December 1944, a week before all the women prisoners her age were killed. She later discovered she had been slated to die but was released due to a simple clerical error.

After the war, Corrie ten Boom returned to the Netherlands to set up rehabilitation centers for the displaced. Her post-war life was devoted to a kind of radical reconciliation and forgiveness that most people would find impossible. But for Corrie, forgiveness was not just a matter of Christian faith, it was practical as well; she later wrote that it was the people who were able to forgive who had the most success rebuilding their lives after the war. She lived her creed of forgiveness; the Schapenduinen center she founded in 1945 provided refuge not only for concentration camp survivors but for homeless and outcast Dutch who had collaborated with Germans during the occupation—people like the ones who had betrayed her to the Germans. Corrie ten Boom even returned to Germany in 1946, as a witness and a leading voice for reconciliation.

In her memoir Tramp for the Lord, Corrie tells how, on one of her visits to Germany, she was approached by a man who had been a guard at Ravensbrück. At the time, she wondered if she could forgive him, but prayed that she would be able to. She wrote that, “For a long moment we grasped each other’s hands, the former guard and the former prisoner. I had never known God’s love so intensely as I did then.”

Corrie ten Boom was knighted by Queen Juliana of the Netherlands for her role in the Dutch Resistance, and honored by Israel as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, alongside fellow Dutchwoman Miep Gies, who had sheltered the Frank family in Amsterdam. The ten Boom house in Haarlem is now a museum honoring the family’s work with the Resistance, and Corrie’s Christian activism. The ten Boom clock shop still does business on the ground floor. Corrie ten Boom moved to Orange County, California in 1977 and died there in 1983 at the age of 91.

This is the “hiding place” in the ten Boom house on Barteljorisstraat: